ITS DISCUSSION TIME Y’ALL

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REMINDER: CHAPTERS 4 + 5 DISCUSSION IN 3 DAYS

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I don’t really have any cool insight about what hooks says, this is just a big paragraph about the book’s effect on me.

Chapter 3 gives me a lot dread when thinking about raising my own children. There is this meme that “kids ask the darnedest things” that is supposed to come off as endearing, cute, silly. In my experience, these questions are jolting. They will ask these “why” questions that reveal that they’ve noticed there is something wrong with the way things are, and if you’re lucky you’ve noticed it too and thought about it already and have a good answer. That answer will be somewhere between an easy lie that’s available and you can gaslight them with a fake answer, or that hundreds of years of oppression and shitty propaganda have spawned this garbage tradition/norm/activity you’re observing. You can probably get away with participating in it too if you meet all the criteria, but if you don’t people might notice and single you out. I am being a little dramatic but not really?

I don’t have a great idea on how to navigate those examples brought up like the boy wanting to wear nail polish or going by Ruby. I want to be the kind of parent that is supportive of whatever decisions my kids make especially if they’re right, but I’m terrified that they’ll be rejected by their peers as they get older. The male loneliness was very relatable to me and not something I want my kids to have to experience. It feels like there is no way to escape patriarchal thinking, best case you can cross some lines but go too far outside the constraints and you’ll be rejected by all your peers who are glued to whatever the youtube algo fed them.

I really appreciate hooks’ discussion of how religion rigidly enforces gender roles, specifically Christian churches in the west. I was deeply involved in an evangelical church as a teenager and oh my god the number of times I heard “men are the head of the family, god wants you women to submit to your husbands” told to a bunch of teenagers (and adults!) still creeps me the fuck out to this day. There’s a lot of discussion in leftist spaces about if and how the existing structures of churches and religious organizations can be used to further our cause but hooks explains the reality well: religious institutions are inherently conservative and have a long history of collaborating with the ruling class.

The next section on the direct impact of this patriarchal thinking on her home life was horrifying to read

I read these two chapters with the recent discussions about Hexbear’s misogyny and general bigotry problems in the back of my mind, particularly the incel apologia that rears its head here whenever that subject gets brought up. hooks dismantles these mindsets very effectively in chapter 2. While she is extensively criticizing feminist “separatist” ideology, she also makes it clear where the lines are drawn (emphasis mine):

Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of sexism on male personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes. According to Joy Justice, separatists believe that there are “two basic perspectives” on the issue of naming the victims of sexism: “There is the perspective that men oppress women. And there is the perspective that people are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.”…Both perspectives accurately describe our predicament. Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns. These two realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.

The incel epidemic spurred on by alienation and rigid societal enforcement of patriarchal gender roles is a serious problem that we should want to do something about. The answer is NOT to carve out space for these violent misogynists in otherwise safe spaces for femmes and minority groups hurt by capitalist patriarchy. Patriarchal men beat their little girls with boards for being better at a marbles game than their little boys. hooks points out that yes, her story is from the 50s, and the general tide is shifting in that regard, but patriarchy is enforced by violence. Why the fuck would you give these violent men the space and opportunity to continue inflicting that on women? Men have to be willing to do the work themselves before we get anywhere near what incel apologists on this very site are advocating for.

If there’s one single section of this book I want every masc user on this site to read, it’s this one (emphasis mine):

Indeed, radical feminist critique of patriarchy has practically been silenced in our culture. It has become a subcultural discourse available only to well educated elites. Even in those circles, using the word “patriarchy” is regarded as passé. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe. I interpret this laughter as the audience’s way of showing discomfort with being asked to ally themselves with an antipatriarchal disobedient critique. This laughter reminds me that if I dare to challenge patriarchy openly, I risk not being taken seriously.

Citizens in this nation fear challenging patriarchy even as they lack overt awareness that they are fearful, so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious are the rules of patriarchy. I often tell audiences that if we were to go door-to-door asking if we should end male violence against women, most people would give their unequivocal support. Then if you told them we can only stop male violence against women by ending male domination, by eradicating patriarchy, they would begin to hesitate, to change their position. Despite the many gains of the contemporary feminist movement—greater equality for women in the workforce, more tolerance for the relinquishing of rigid gender roles—patriarchy as a system remains intact, and many people continue to believe that it is needed if humans are to survive as a species.

…To end patriarchy we must challenge both its psychological and its concrete manifestations in daily life. There are folks who are able to critique patriarchy but unable to act in an antipatriarchal manner.

When users on this site (specifically, cishet white masc users) talk over or flat out ignore what minority users are telling them about the bigotry problem on HB, they are the same people who laughed at bell hooks when she dared to name the problem of patriarchy to an audience. They are the same people who agree that male violence against women needs to end, but if that means they lose some benefits of patriarchy, suddenly they’re not on board, and the people criticizing their shitty behavior are having “outbursts”, said in the most condescending tone imaginable. You can claim to be a leftist, you can claim to be a socialist or an anarchist or a communist, but personally identifying with leftism, by itself, is not anywhere near enough. Your “””right””” to make silly little “ironic” misogyny/racism/chauvinism posts on an internet forum is not more important than the safety and liberation of the people you call your comrades. And particularly, if you try to use the above sections from hooks or any other part of her work as a cudgel to make femmes be kind and welcoming to men who want to hurt them, you are a reactionary and you can fuck all the way off out of this space until you start giving a shit about excising your brainworms.

I’m deeply depressed by the fact that the people who need to read this book the most, won’t. I appreciate every one of my Hexbear comrades, and those from the wider fediverse (hi yall!), who are taking the time to engage with this material and educate themselves. This is my first time reading this book as well so we’re all on a learning journey together. From the bottom of my hear, thank you all for your insights and discussions you’re bringing to the table. This is how we learn and grow.

One last piece I wanna highlight from chapter 3:

Every day across this country boys consume mass media images that send them one message about how to deal with emotions, and that message is “Act out.” Usually acting out means aggression directed outward. Kicking, screaming, and hitting get attention. Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode. Very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it. And even when boys are able to express feelings in early childhood, they learn as they grow up that they are not supposed to feel and they shut down.

…Time and time again we hear on our national news about the seemingly kind, quiet young male whose violent underpinnings are suddenly revealed. Boys are encouraged by patriarchal thinking to claim rage as the easiest path to manliness. It should come as no surprise, then, that beneath the surface there is a seething anger in boys, a rage waiting for the moment to be heard.

I feel like I’m in a weird position because I totally relate to this, being seen by others irl as a mild-mannered, “nice” guy while holding a deep sadness and often anger inside, but I’m also too anxious and too hyperaware of other peoples’ perceptions of me to really “act out” in the way she describes here, which is good, thank fuck I’m not inclined to violence and rageful outbursts and never have been. But all these feelings and insecurities I hold don’t really have an outlet at the moment, they just fester. I can identify this rage within myself and the way it presents through self-medication, distracting myself with media, and keeping my true feelings largely contained to when I’m alone and therefore feel free to express them to just myself. If push came to shove I would “implode” as she describes long before I turned that anger and despair on another person. I’ve been considering going back to therapy and this is really helping push me in that direction, I want to be emotionally well not just for myself but for my loved ones, my neighbors, my comrades.

We’re still early in the book but I’m really eager to see hooks provide an alternate path to healthy masculinity, which I assume will come later. Also, how do you reach people who have little conception of patriarchy or feminism and convince them that yes actually it’s good for everyone when you educate yourself and desire to change for the better? Very interested to hear everyone’s thoughts this week!

I didn’t finish chapter 3 but I did read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is such a good chapter. In the same way I think Marx lays it all pretty flat in the “Communist Manifesto”, I think bell hooks lays out the whole game of Patriarchy in clear and plain language. One thing I love about this book is that language both really beautiful but also just straightforward.

I also really appreciate this chapter’s view on how violence is both a systemic thing but also a group thing. I mean that I like that hooks talks about how the violence happens in the home through physical violence of course but also through socialization. It really is a form of indoctrination we all are coerced into.

“Patriarchy promotes insanity” is so fuckin’ real. Men’s mental health is abysmal and Patriarchy does nothing to actually aid us. It creates the conditions of our anguish and woe. I think the social narrative that men need to dominate women is an acid that burns through the foundations of most men’s mental health. It creates all of these weird unrealistic expectations that no one can live up to.

I also really love how bell hooks doesn’t really let anyone off the hook saying that it’s something we all play into, but she never says “women bad” or “men bad” but does rightly say “systems bad”.

I felt inspired by chapter three to think about my own childhood. I could think of many little patriarchal “lessons”. This is just a selection of tiny incidents. I left out any bullying or the soul crushing inability to talk about feelings with my parents.

• I was friends with two girls in kindergarden, but felt the expectation to only associate with boys in primary school.
• I remember in my (all gender) scout group, a group leader told me not to sit in a particular way, with my legs crossed, because that looked “gay”. When asked why she sat in the same way she explained, that as a woman, she was allowed to.
• I remember boys worrying allot about having a “men’s bicycle” instead of a “lady’s bicycle”
• I remember, how my brother and I had found a doll somewhere and that we later overheard my mother explaining to a friend, that she didn’t mind her sons playing with dolls even though they were actually for girls. It sounded like a big deal to us and the new toy was soon discarded.

Being that I’m a fair bit younger and from a more “liberal” background, grew up in Sweden during the 90s and 00s which is when feminism as a “thing” hit it’s apex. After that it has been steadily declining in popularity. What feminism in Sweden means is a bit difficult to explain. It is very much focused on getting women into the work force, financially and legally independent and access to childcare, reproductive rights and maternity/paternity leave. As such a lot of the messaging that men have to be the head of the family etc were a lot more subtle than the constant barrages from her own childhood.

Of course, a lot of the professions of feminism were just skin deep and the movement was already running out of steam. But the role of the man as the obvious head of the household was already well eroded. When I went to church the trendy thing for priests was to alternate between she and he for God. But one of the big issues that eventually sank the movement was the inability to move on from separatist second wave feminism, it never really dealt with the imperialist or white supremacist part nor provided a convincing answer for what a healthy masculinity was supposed to be other than slogans like “a real man cares about their child”. If you are interested in learning more about the history of political feminism in Sweden, Yvonne Hirdman wrote a book titled “What is to be done” (Vad bör göras? : Jämställdhet och politik under femtio år) which chronicles the history between the 60’s to the 10’s, but I don’t think it is available in English. I disagree with a lot of the conclusions but it is an interesting view if you’re interested in gender history. With all that said, lets move on from this tangent.

I was raised by a single mother who very much is a feminist and wanted both me and my brother to be comfortable in showing our emotions. I assume that she had a lot similar experiences to the story of Terrence Real describes. We were very much schooled into patriarchal norms by our peers. Sadly, mom didn’t really have any good answers for what we should do when the wheels of me and my older brother hit the road of society.

Moving on to chapter 3, I was very much schooled into patriarchal thinking by my peers, and also by myself. The early part of the chapter reminds me of how mum told me about how when I was a baby I was always smiling and laughing. As a young boy I was also very cheery and outgoing, if a bit strange. Once I started seeing how my brother got shunned and how sad that made mom I had it in my head that I had to be “normal” so that I wouldn’t cause a fuss. This involved, and still involves, a lot of shame and internalized anger. I had some very rudimentary feminist theory under my belt during my adolescence (separatist second wave, having had access to something like this book would likely have helped a lot), so I never blamed women or feminism for my problems to fit in, but myself for failing and other boys and men for setting the rules. I had a lot of dissonance between forcing myself to be normal and fit in with the normal boys (did sports etc) in order to seem well adjusted while secretly blaming my own maleness and others of my gender for feeling like shit and being unable to truly fit in.

Little boys are the only males in our culture who are allowed to be fully, wholly in touch with their feelings, allowed moments when they can express without shame their desire to love and be loved. If they are very, very lucky, they are able to remain connected to their inner selves or some part of their inner selves before they enter a patriarchal school system where rigid sex roles will be enforced by peers as rigorously as they are in any adult male prison. Those rare boys who happen to live in antipatriarchal homes learn early to lead a double life: at home they can feel and express and be; outside the home they must conform to the role of patriarchal boy.

I can recognize the double life, but I would also smothered my emotions at home. I would act out as the happy and always jovial son to my mother so she wouldn’t worry about me. She had enough to deal with between work/studies, money problems and my brother who was constantly depressed. Every now and then when mom would attend me during school or sports she would often get aghast at the kind of treatment I had to deal with. This was a further reason for me to hide away what was happening. The only real positive reinforcement I got for a masculine attribute was my ‘stoicism’. I had my football coaches specifically tell me that my role in the team was to be the one that the other boys got to “mess with” as I could take it. So I did take it, but I won’t go into details. Talking about it with mum as an adult she was shocked at what was actually going on and wishes that she could have done more to help. A kind of interesting tangent is that by the time I was reading Harry Potter, which was when I was 8, I never once identified with Harry Potter. The one I identified with was Ron Weasley, which probably says a whole lot about my self esteem. That is a constant in when I’ve read/seen a lot of fiction, I don’t identify as the main character but instead as the lesser, the sidekick.

The thing I really don’t recognize myself in is the urge to connect to your father. Maybe it is because I didn’t see him much and he was always emotionally abscent, but it felt like somewhere I had to be out of duty more than out of care. The hope of fatherly love was never truly on the table in my experience, we would get abandoned from our loving home to go off and spend a weekend with someone that didn’t really care about us. If it wasn’t for my younger half brother I would probably have insisted to stop going there around age 10-11, but I kept going to see him.

Throughout my adult mental health journey i have always struggled with that first session - when they ask about your childhood. Mine was good, great! Both parents and my grandma who lived with us gave me physical affection, encouraged me. I had a pretty good church community, I got to have piano lessons, and my parents were quite involved in my education.

Of course, i was spanked especially as a young child, also by both parents. Generally at the behest of my father, but with the wooden spoon being wielded by both parents at different times. Still, this is really mild especially compared to the abuse they both received as children, so i always felt like i had it good, i felt (and i am) privileged, and didnt understand why i was never emotionally satisfied.

My current therapist as well as getting an ADHD diagnosis has been the best at actually getting through to those childhood feelings. I vividly remember the terror of spankings (in the visual memory, my mom is the one holding the wooden spoon). I somehow learned to cry alone in my room. When i did cry in front of my family, it wasnt taken seriously (i was the youngest, weakest, wimpiest, and just wanted to throw tantrums). As i got older i have so many memories of crying while i was doing chores that i could never get quite right (ADHD and a huge yard meant i always missed some spots when mowing).

When my parents adopted my younger brother, i witnessed it firsthand as an adult - my father struggling for control over him, and my mom capitulating to my dad’s desire to exercise control over him at any cost.

I dont know where to go from here. I am inspired to continue breaking down my emotional walls and be a supportive and supported husband. As we are planning to have kid(s) of our own in the near future, it feels more important than ever. I just want to make sure i am not simply a lesser version of my father. He was “better” than his dad by miles, but the pain of the entrenched patriarchal values that i cant live up to still haunt me, ive never felt entirely open with them, hell i still feel the sting of failure to this day about a lot of things. I dont want to be the same as my father but without spanking and with a bit more “gentle parenting” aesthsetics. I want to raise children that are emotionally healthy, whole, and have the values of helping their community and looking out for others rather than looking to dominate.

Great read as always and i look forward to next week

Great chapters! Again, I really am enjoying the audiobook, the reader’s voice is powerful yet kind, in a way that really drives home what I believe is Hooks’ intended tone.

Some thoughts:

I really loved the explanation of how patriarchy is reinforced through social pressures and tools like laughter, rather than reason. Shame is the tool of the oppressive system. I also felt that the sections on male rage as an outlet for patriarchy’s pressures on men strikes incredibly true and straight at the reality of the violence on women and other men alike.

The anecdote about marbles was heartbreaking as well, but very powerful in illustrating how even though women are the primary target of patriarchy, even men who are forced to adopt a privledged role are psychologically damaged and hurt by it as well, fueling an endless cycle of systemic violence that circles back into bottled up emotions and pent up rage.

Excited to read what others have to say! I’m not too good at giving my thoughts, this is my first time participating in reading threads, but I promise I’ll get better!

Like a lot of folk in here, chapters 2 and 3 sent me on a deeply unenjoyable walk through my own childhood as if taking inventory of my experience as compared to what hooks speaks of; and I feel like her analysis that ‘the most present enforcers of fledgling patriarchal thought in a young boy is his peer-group’ links hand in hand with a lot of why I’m not willing to father children; the exact same root that my ‘by the time your seed is 5, your seed may as well no longer be yours with how much time your seed’s school wants to keep them there’ take springs from.

Your kid spends more time around peers and teachers than they do you by the time they’re seven or eight; which leads to the exact kind of anecdotes as the family that TRIED raising their youth to be anti-patriarchal only to find that their son was still being bombarded with messages-- with shame– from within the school to a point that it undermined and jeopardized the lessons the parents were trying to teach.

I think what sticks in my craw about it the most is seeing my own upbringing in that. Mine wasn’t a household where I could even think of becoming anything other than the demanding, every-flavor-but-sexually abusive patriarch my fill-in was. Even before it was my peers labeling me the ‘sissy’ or f/, it was him; any time I showed weakness, any time I let a tear escape, any time he could hear me reacting to the ways he’d hit me, or mentally cut me down. And it had the intended effect. I was emotionally dead by ten, and certain that if I didn’t leave home by the time I was 14, it was either going to boil down to me or him, one of us was going to kill the other. Which just walks itself back to those that live under abusive, domineering patriarchy praying for the death of the patriarch, doesn’t it?

What scares me is that I still could; that the potential for violence even in spite of all I’ve learned and all I’ve tried to un-learn, is still there. That man hasn’t moved houses in 17 years. I could go ‘home’, stake his neighborhood out a couple weeks, kick the downstairs sliding door through-- or maybe get in through one of the un-screened windows, 'cause I know without me to handle all the menial labor, he sure didn’t do it himself-- and put him down like a dog with cancer on his ratty-assed couch these days. Any number of ways, really; he prepared me for violence, and in spite of it all, that violence hasn’t gone.

I can’t forgive him for what he shaped me into before my actual father could get to me. Not that he was any better (he wasn’t abusive to me; if anything, I was my bio father’s golden child lost and found; but he WAS more or less a hyper-misogynist who cheated hard and often enough to more or less steer my patriarchal development in the ‘heartless casanova’ direction than the ‘nearly a school shooter’ direction by action even BEFORE he started ‘teaching’ me), but at least I got a couple good years with him.

I always had an intuitive sense of this. That my dad felt entitled to unquestioning obedience, and that this was because he felt he earned it by enduring his own time living in the shadow of his patriarch and his older sisters.

Between this and other passages in chapter 2, I’m beginning to think it may be in my emotional best interest to someday forgive my father for his enforcing of patriarchy onto me… Frustrating, because I have found some liberation in internally expressing anger about my treatment and pushing back on it.

I fell behind a bit but all caught up now.

Most of my own experience with patriarchy was of the psychological kind. My mom made it a point to my dad that he was not to beat me as violently as was described in chapter two. Not that it freed me from the occasionally slap, but my dad early on would threaten to beat me with a belt or a chancleta (oh boy do we as latinos love joking about “la chancleta”).

I think Hooks makes a good point about how both the men and women of the family contribute to the maintenance of the patriarchy. As much as my mom loved us she would still do the “big boys don’t cry” type stuff. Even now anytime she hears about how one of my cousin’s sons has a tendency to throw sobbing fits when things don’t go his way she’ll say “he’s too old to be crying like that”.

Also religion in my mom’s side of the family is definitely used as a justification for reinforcing gender norms and male dominance. Not that long ago I had posted about a small family gathering where the man that is dating my cousin went through all of the tropes of patriarchal dominance (the man is the ruler of the house, women’s place in the family is to support her man, among queerphobic points) and all of the women present added their voices in support of what he was saying aside from my mom. My mom mostly stayed quite, but I know she really felt like the way they were talking was problematic. Its a bit at odds with her religious beliefs, but she at the very least believes in more equality in the home, even if, as I mentioned before, she reinforces some of the very ideas of patriarchy expressed here.

Going back to the point of psychological patriarchy, for most, if not all of my youth, my dad never really expressed much affection for me. that changed a bit with my brother, who he used to be more expressive with. But he still would say things that would make me, and probably my brother, about what it meant to be a man. One thing that has always stuck out to me was this story about my older half brother that he’d always tell us. It was about how one day he came home and found him and his friend practicing a dance or something along those lines. When he found him he told him that he wasn’t going to have his son influenced by him and kicked him out of the house. I honestly don’t know what exactly was the cause. Whether it was just that there may just have been that he didn’t want him to be “street/ghetto” or if it was some homophobia, but the story always stuck with me. I’ve never invited a friend over to my home and my brother has just once or twice. Add to that the general mistrust that the media creates in each other, which usually pushed my mom to emphasize that we shouldn’t just go anywhere that our friends invited us, and my possible neurodivergance, and it made for a childhood where I generally didn’t really connect with people.

There was always this conflict in my mind between being emotionally expressive and “thinking before I spoke” as one well meaning teacher once told me. I learned to keep my feelings to myself. The talk about disassociating and disconnecting in this chapter really struck a nerve with me because I had a period during high school where I completely isolated myself. My friends would often tell me to stop eating by myself during break and while I would join them for a day or two I would go back to isolating. High school was also the first time I had someone tell me I have “school shooter vibes”. And I always laugh it off, even to this day, but thinking about it hurts because I don’t really hold ill will towards my peers like that. I also have a former co-worker that I still hang out with from time to time that always complements me on my “emotional control” and I fucking hate it. He watches videos and other manosphere stuff and I fucking hate that he looks up to me for that reason. Truth is I’m just masking my emotions. And it eats me up inside that at my age I don’t really know how to properly express myself.

Well. Not so much that as much as I always hesitate to express myself because as Hooks pointed out, I just grew up in an environment where patriarchy enforces the idea of the emotionless male. Whether it was my parents or my friends and peers, its something that is always present and always propagating itself.

with chapters like 2-5 (as soon as I got the ebook downloaded and switched to that from the audiobook I ended up reading ahead lol) this book really hits its stride for me.

I get why it’s so widely recommended now. my most salient thoughts are on the later chapters, especially the sanctioning of male violence and the substituting of lower-hierarchy males as targets of violence and sexuality, as well as pervasiveness of patriarchal behavior in gay men.

ch2 left me thinking that, at least in childhood, things have gotten somewhat better since hooks’ childhood. The shame and emotional abuse are still there, but the physical abuse is less normalized. But upon further reflection, its a much smaller effect than you might think, as a lot of that violence has just gone underground.

The first couple paragraphs of chapter two are amazing. See below (emphasis mine)

I often use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics. Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles.

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence

Calling the patriarchy by its full name really shows how systematic it is and removes some of the lowest hanging critics right away. I will need to remember this when I hear “We don’t live in a patriarchy because my boss is a woman” or “rich people regardless of gender are oppressors, so we don’t live in a patriarchy” to bring up the full name. With the full name these bad critics are really bad faith arguments.

The real key to understanding the patriarchy is the dominating over those deemed lesser on this hierarchy. Once you understand it you can see it everywhere. The insistence that someone people’s time / life / body are worth less than others, the implicit violence, and the insistence there is one way to be a “real man”. If you can get someone to read these two paragraphs only or all of chapter 2 it would be a major eye opener for some people